The three COVID-19 years were a tumultuous period marked by social isolation, lifestyle disruptions and stress. We know that hearing or talking or seeing news about COVID-19 now triggers Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD, a mental health condition caused by an extremely stressful or terrifying event. I have always wondered how much of that PTSD is due not only to the fear of COVID but to the fear, social isolation, lifestyle disruption and stress of the lockdown.
How can one ever forget driving from Diego Martin early that first Sunday morning of the COVID lockdown, passing one or two lonely cars on the Cocorite stretch, St James clear as far as the eye could see, and, as we came around the QRC corner at the Savannah, encountering a scene of desolation, an empty expanse of Maraval Road leading up to the Maraval roundabout, not a car parked in front of the liming spot opposite QRC or anywhere up the road and not a single person walking or jogging up or down.
Against my wife’s wishes, “Let’s go home,” I stopped the car and got out. Silence greeted me as I looked around in bewilderment. The silence was unnerving. I hastily got back in. We circled the Savannah without talking and returned home, chastised at our experience, at having the gumption to go out to see what was happening in town. Nada. Nothing! Just thinking about that one experience makes my heart race, my breathing rate increase and my brain slow down from anxiety. Over the next few weeks, that experience happened again and again. Empty neighbourhoods, empty parks, empty offices, empty minds.
What is the effect of those repeated emotional insults that happened to all of us, even those who did not get COVID?
We have long known that the virus of COVID can damage not only the lungs and the heart but also the brain. It now seems the lockdown itself can damage the brain too.
Two studies published last week attest to this. The research was done using MRIs of the brain of healthy individuals. It’s possible to tell the age of a person by analysing MRIs of the brain. The first study looked at the brains of adolescent boys and girls who had not experienced COVID infection. It found two things. First COVID lockdowns prematurely aged the brains of both cohorts. Secondly, the ageing affected girls more than boys. On the average, after lockdown, girls’ brains appeared just over four years older than expected, compared with 1.4 years older for boys. The changes in girls, who are much more interested in social groups and interactions and are therefore more susceptible to being unable to interact with their peers, showed more changes in the areas of the brain vital for processing emotions and interpreting facial expressions and language.
Does this explain the upsurge in fights we’ve been seeing among young women in our schools? Is there a physical reason for the violence? Before punishing them, should we be doing MRI scans on these girls? Should we be looking at MRI scans of the brains of those who locked down the country for so long, one of the longest in the world?
The second MRI study was done in over 15,000 healthy adults who had not experienced COVID infection. The result? Again, lockdown aged the brain, this time by six months. It was more pronounced in males and especially those from deprived socioeconomic backgrounds. It’s unclear right now whether this lockdown-associated brain ageing is reversible.
Fortunately, so far, tests of cerebral function have revealed that mental agility declined only in people who had COVID-19 and not in those whose MRIs showed brain ageing.
One has to assume that the increase in aggression and violence in adults over the last five years has more to do with drugs, corruption and racial politics, than with brain ageing, whether due to COVID-19 or COVID-19 lockdown.
In summary, after the first year, when the virus had become less aggressive and vaccines had become available, national lockdowns were mostly useless. Those lockdowns aged our brains. It seems everybody was involved, adolescents and adults. More so in adolescent females and adult males, especially those men from poorer areas.
An unanswered question is whether the longer the lockdown, the more the brain was affected.
We don’t know as yet about children under age 12 but it’s to be expected that because their brains were developing so much faster, the effect is going to be worse. If it affects the age of the brain in children, how does that translate to children’s emotions and behaviour? And did the lockdown do anything else to children’s brains? We’ll find out in the years to come.